When a scorched & smouldering Elf staggered back from Flickr with this magnificent flying machine we immediately kicked him straight back out of The Lego Car Blog offices. Sadly, we weren’t quite fast enough and the smoke detectors triggered the sprinkler system. We’ve spent the rest of the morning hiring an industrial dehumidifier and hanging 169¾ Elves out on the washing line. This looks quite pretty and is really rather decorative. We might just leave them there. Then we got quite excited, as we thought that we’d never blogged a hot air balloon before. It turns that we have, but we have blogged a lot of stuff since the start in November 2011.

This particular balloon was built by Pete Strege. It’s a brilliant assemblage of all shapes and sizes of plain, angled and curved plates. The neat way that the basket is attached is obvious from the photos but not so much the internal structure of the balloon itself. Follow the link in the text and see if you can zoom in to the detail and figure it out.